[Excerpt translation from Spanish provided by Business and Human Rights Resource Centre]

International organizations asked for an urgent intervention after the arbitrary detention and criminalisation of the president of a farmers community in Fuerabamba, Gregorio Rojas Paniura; the vice president, Edinson Vargas Huamanga and the secretary, Nohemí Portilla Vargas, for alleged organised crime and aggravated extortion by the Peruvian State and the Chinese mining company MMG Las Bambas. Before this, the Observatorio para la Protección Mundial Contra La Tortura (OMCT) (The Observatory for the Global Protection Against Torture) and the Federación Internacional de Derechos Humanos (FIDH) (International Federation of Human Rights) considered that these detentions violate article 10.2 of ILO 169 Convention. Said article says that judges when processing members of indigenous groups, “must give preference to the types of sanctions different from imprisonment”. The Observatory mentioned in a document that “the openings of the judicial and criminal processes plan to obstruct the work of defenders and to intimidate the community” …The conflict spins across the entire mining corridor because of the negative effects on the communities caused by the mining company intervention…